No Arabic abstract
Manipulating materials with atomic-scale precision is essential for the development of next-generation material design toolbox. Tremendous efforts have been made to advance the compositional, structural, and spatial accuracy of material deposition and patterning. The family of 2D materials provides an ideal platform to realize atomic-level material architectures. The wide and rich physics of these materials have led to fabrication of heterostructures, superlattices, and twisted structures with breakthrough discoveries and applications. Here, we report a novel atomic-scale material design tool that selectively breaks and forms chemical bonds of 2D materials at room temperature, called atomic-layer substitution (ALS), through which we can substitute the top layer chalcogen atoms within the 3-atom-thick transition-metal dichalcogenides using arbitrary patterns. Flipping the layer via transfer allows us to perform the same procedure on the other side, yielding programmable in-plane multi-heterostructures with different out-of-plane crystal symmetry and electric polarization. First-principle calculations elucidate how the ALS process is overall exothermic in energy and only has a small reaction barrier, facilitating the reaction to occur at room temperature. Optical characterizations confirm the fidelity of this design approach, while TEM shows the direct evidence of Janus structure and suggests the atomic transition at the interface of designed heterostructure. Finally, transport and Kelvin probe measurements on MoXY (X,Y=S,Se; X and Y corresponding to the bottom and top layers) lateral multi-heterostructures reveal the surface potential and dipole orientation of each region, and the barrier height between them. Our approach for designing artificial 2D landscape down to a single layer of atoms can lead to unique electronic, photonic and mechanical properties previously not found in nature.
Polar metals, commonly defined by the coexistence of polar crystal structure and metallicity, are thought to be scarce because the long-range electrostatic fields favoring the polar structure are expected to be fully screened by the conduction electrons of a metal. Moreover, reducing from three to two dimensions, it remains an open question whether a polar metal can exist. Here we report on the realization of a room temperature two-dimensional polar metal of the B-site type in tri-color (tri-layer) superlattices BaTiO$_3$/SrTiO$_3$/LaTiO$_3$. A combination of atomic resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy with electron energy loss spectroscopy, optical second harmonic generation, electrical transport, and first-principles calculations have revealed the microscopic mechanisms of periodic electric polarization, charge distribution, and orbital symmetry. Our results provide a route to creating all-oxide artificial non-centrosymmetric quasi-two-dimensional metals with exotic quantum states including coexisting ferroelectric, ferromagnetic, and superconducting phases.
Thermal ammonolysis of quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) CoTa2O6 yields the O2-/N3- and anionic vacancy ordered Co2+Ta5+2O6-xN2x/3$Box$x/3 (x $leq$ 0.15) that exhibits a transition from antiferromagnetism to defect engineered above room-temperature ferromagnetism as evidenced by diffraction, spectroscopic and magnetic characterizations. First-principles calculations reveal the origin of ferromagnetism is a particular CoON configuration with N located at Wyckoff position 8j, which breaks mirror symmetry about ab plane. A pressure-induced electronic phase transition is also predicted at around 24.5 GPa, accompanied by insulator-to-metal transition and magnetic moment vanishing.
Giant spin-splitting was recently predicted in collinear antiferromagnetic materials with a specific class of magnetic space group. In this work, we have predicted a two-dimensional (2D) antiferromagnetic Weyl semimetal (WS), CrO with large spin-split band structure, spin-momentum locked transport properties and high Neel temperature. It has two pairs of spin-polarized Weyl points at the Fermi level. By manipulating the position of the Weyl points with strain, four different antiferromagnetic spintronic states can be achieved: WSs with two spin-polarized transport channels (STCs), WSs with single STC, semiconductors with two STCs, and semiconductors with single STC. Based on these properties, a new avenue in spintronics with 2D collinear antiferromagnets is proposed.
Memristive devices whose resistance can be hysteretically switched by electric field or current are intensely pursued both for fundamental interest as well as potential applications in neuromorphic computing and phase-change memory. When the underlying material exhibits additional charge or spin order, the resistive states can be directly coupled, further allowing for electrical control of the collective phases. Here, we report the observation of abrupt, memristive switching of tunneling current in nanoscale junctions of ultrathin CrI$_3$, a natural layer antiferromagnet. The coupling to spin order enables both tuning of the resistance hysteresis by magnetic field, and electric-field switching of magnetization even in multilayer samples.
The anisotropic nature of the new two-dimensional (2D) material phosphorene, in contrast to other 2D materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors, allows excitons to be confined in a quasi-one-dimensional (1D) space predicted in theory, leading to remarkable phenomena arising from the reduced dimensionality and screening. Here, we report a trion (charged exciton) binding energy of 190 meV in few-layer phosphorene at room temperature, which is nearly one to two orders of magnitude larger than those in 2D TMD semiconductors (20-30 meV) and quasi-2D quantum wells (1-5 meV). Such a large binding energy has only been observed in truly 1D materials such as carbon nanotubes, whose optoelectronic applications have been severely hurdled by their intrinsically small optical cross-sections. Phosphorene offers an elegant way to overcome this hurdle by enabling quasi-1D excitonic and trionic behaviors in a large 2D area, allowing optoelectronic integration. We experimentally validated the quasi-1D nature of excitonic and trionic dynamics in phospherene by demonstrating completely linearly polarized light emission from excitons and trions. The implications of the extraordinarily large trion binding energy in a higher-than-one-dimensional material are far-reaching. It provides a room-temperature 2D platform to observe the fundamental many-body interactions in the quasi-1D region. The strong photoluminescence emission in phosphorene has been electrically tuned over a large spectral range at room temperature, which opens a new route for tunable light sources.